Margret mead biography

Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist, who was frequently a featured author and speaker in the mass media throughout the s and s.

Life

Mead earned her bachelor degree at Barnard College in New York City, and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University (). She was both a popularizer of the insights of anthropology into modern American and Western culture and a respected, if controversial, academic anthropologist.

Mead was married three times. Her first husband (–) was American Luther Cressman, a theology student at the time. Her second husband was New Zealander Reo Fortune, a Cambridge graduate (–). Her third and longest-lasting marriage (–) was to the British anthropologist Gregory Bateson with whom she had a daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson. Her encounter with Bateson is described in the chapters 16 and 17 of her autobiography.

Visual anthropology

Mead studied anthropology with Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict at Columbia University before earning her Master's in Boas is considered by some specialists as the ‘father figure in visual anthropology’ (Ruby , Jacknis ).

Along with Bateson, Mead was a pioneer in the use of film and photography in her ethnographic research. It helped to underscore the importance of visual evidence in ethnographic research as well as the value of images in conveying crosscultural information to the public. Not only was Mead one of the earliest anthropologists to integrate visual methods into her research, she was also one of the first anthropologists to focus on the study of visual communication, including nonverbal communication, kinesics (the study of body motion), and proxemics (the study of territoriality and personal space), and she pioneered teaching anthropology courses on culture and communication (bot

Margaret Mead’s Early Life

Mead, who turned the study of primitive cultures into a vehicle for criticizing her own, was born in Philadelphia on December 16, Both her father, Edward Mead, an economist at the Wharton School, and her mother, Emily Mead, a sociologist of immigrant family life and a feminist, were devoted to intellectual achievement and democratic ideals.

Mead discovered her calling as an undergraduate at Barnard College in the early s in classes with Franz Boas, the patriarch of American anthropology, and in discussions with his assistant, Ruth Benedict. The study of early cultures, she learned, offered a unique laboratory for exploring a central question in American life: How much of human behavior is universal, therefore presumably natural and unalterable, and how much is socially induced? Among a people widely convinced of the inferiority of women and the immutability of gender roles, clear answers to this question could have important social consequences.

Margaret Mead’s Theories: Gender Consciousness and Imprinting

Selecting the peoples of the South Pacific as the focus of her research, Mead spent the rest of her life exploring the plasticity of human nature and the variability of social customs. In her first study, Coming of Age in Samoa (), she observed that Samoan children moved with relative ease into the adult world of sexuality and work, in contrast to children in the United States, where lingering Victorian restraints on sexual behavior and the increasing separation of children from the productive world made youth a needlessly difficult time.

Westerners’ deep-seated belief in innate femininity and masculinity served only to compound these troubles, Mead continued in Sex and Temperament (). Describing the widely varying temperaments exhibited by men and women in different cultures, from the nurturing men of the Arapesh tribe to the violent women of the Mundugumor, Mead maintained that social convention, not biology, determines ho

American cultural anthropologist (–)

"Margaret Bateson" redirects here. For the British journalist and activist, see Margaret Heitland.

Not to be confused with the British anthropologist Margaret Read.

Margaret Mead (December 16, – November 15, ) was an American cultural anthropologist, author and speaker, who appeared frequently in the mass media during the s and the s.

She earned her bachelor's degree at Barnard College of Columbia University and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia. Mead served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in

Mead was a communicator of anthropology in modern American and Western culture and was often controversial as an academic. Her reports detailing the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures influenced the s sexual revolution. She was a proponent of broadening sexual conventions within the context of Western cultural traditions.

Early life and education

Margaret Mead, the first of five children, was born in Philadelphia but raised in nearby Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Her father, Edward Sherwood Mead, was a professor of finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and her mother, Emily (née Fogg) Mead, was a sociologist who studied Italian immigrants. Her sister Katharine (–) died at the age of nine months. That was a traumatic event for Mead, who had named the girl, and thoughts of her lost sister permeated her daydreams for many years.

Her family moved frequently and so her early education was directed by her grandmother until, at age 11, she was enrolled by her family at Buckingham Friends School in Lahaska, Pennsylvania. Her family owned the Longland farm from to Born into a family of various religious outlooks, she searched for a form of religion that gave an expression of the faith wit